The Working Class in American Film:  The Creation of Image and Culture by Hollywood in the 1960s and 1970s
Powered By Xquantum

The Working Class in American Film: The Creation of Image and Cu ...

Chapter :  Introduction
Read
image Next

This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.


In Part 4, the transformation of the working class in film is completed. The mid-1970s films explored here valorize the working class, often by celebrating the American Dream and offering uplifting storylines. This reaffirmation of the American dream contrasts with the films of the early 1970s, most of which ended badly for the protagonists, whether working class, middle class, or affluent. As Sylvester Stallone said at the time of Rocky’s release in 1976, “I believe the country as a whole is beginning to break out of this…anti-everything syndrome…this nihilistic, Hemingwayistic attitude that everything in the end must wither and die” (Leab 265). Some of these films, particularly Rocky, helped to redefine the working class by providing a generally sympathetic rendering of the group while exploring the angst of working people and their efforts to build and rebuild community. But they also essentialize the working class in a way that recalls earlier depictions of the working class during Hollywood’s studio era. All of these films, even ones originally considered from the left, celebrate “traditional American values” at the expense of progressivism in any form. These films include Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), a film about a newly widowed mother of a teenage son; Hard Times (1975), a film set in the Great Depression that borrows theme and character from the classic Hollywood western; Jaws, a blockbuster film about a working-class everyman who must save a community from its own greed and reinstate the patriarch; Rocky, a film that signals the emergence of the ethnic working-class hero; and Blue Collar, a film that returns to the antilabor themes of films like On the Waterfront (1954) while providing essentialized portrayals of both white and African American “hard-hats.” Several other “ethnic-revival” films that followed Rocky are also briefly sketched. All of these films played a role in redefining the working class in the mid-1970s, often wistfully attempting to recapture an imagined past.

Finally, Part 5 primarily explores two films that reflect America as the counterculture era winds down and the Reagan revolution takes hold. Both films offer a look at how the issues of the 1960s and early 1970s impacted the working class. The theme of community, recurrent in films throughout the counterculture epoch, is prominent here. The Deer Hunter